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puppet |
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puppetFigure manipulated on a small stage, usually by an unseen operator. The earliest known puppets are from 10th-century BC China. The types include finger or glove puppets (such as Punch); string marionettes (which reached a high artistic level in ancient Burma and Sri Lanka and in Italian princely courts from the 16th to 18th centuries, and for which the composer Franz Joseph Haydn wrote his operetta Dido in 1778); shadow silhouettes (operated by rods and seen on a lit screen, as in Java); and bunraku (devised in Osaka, Japan), in which three or four black-clad operators on stage may combine to work each puppet about 1 m/3 ft high.
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I've made many a puppet since I've been a witch, but methinks this is the finest of them all. On some flimsy pretext or other Mowanna, the king of Nukuheva, whom the invaders by extravagant presents cajoled over to their interests, and move about like a mere puppet, has been set up as the rightful sovereign of the entire island--the alleged ruler by prescription of various clans, who for ages perhaps have treated with each other as separate nations. As it was, miserably and helplessly, not half himself, a puppet dreamer in a half-nightmare, he knew, as a restless sleeper awakening between vexing dreams, that he was being transported head-downward out of the canoe house that stank of death, through the village that was only less noisome, and up a path under lofty, wide-spreading trees that were beginning languidly to stir with the first breathings of the morning wind. |
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